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Tag Archives: materialism

Getting by on beauty

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Nutrition

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I’ve been doing my taxes, studying returns from the last few years and sorting through my bank account statements to make sure everything is in order. Not for the first time, I’m vaguely surprised by how little I make, considering how good I think my life is. But I can appreciate getting paid partially in freedom.

I mean, it helps that I live in a place that is naturally beautiful and that offers relatively inexpensive recreation, where you can get organic produce off alleyway trees and walk just about everywhere. It helps that, personality-wise, I am almost anal in how careful I am with my money. It helps that (because of this) my only debt is my mortgage. And I’m not going to lie — getting to travel for work to places I actually want to go helps too. It provides decadence to what would otherwise be a more austere lifestyle.

But austere only in a certain way — in exchange for a smallish paycheck from editing an eight-issue-a-year magazine, I can write, I can explore the wilderness that surrounds me, or I can leave work early on Friday for a mini-roadtrip somewhere. Or I can take a freelance job and be gone for a week. Or I can cut out if the snow is looking tempting in the winter or the rock is looking tempting in the summer. And I do these things. Even with a part-time job, it’s amazing how little time I have left for things like laundry.

I don’t think this freedom would have been possible if I hadn’t made a habit of doing something I’ll call “respecting the cushion.” You know how driver safety manuals advise you to keep a three-second cushion between you and other drivers (or more depending on conditions) so that you won’t crash into them before you can stop? The same basic principle applies to your bank account. You’re going to suddenly need the plumbing fixed, or suddenly need to visit the emergency room, or suddenly need to replace your alternator. If you’ve got no cushion, you’ll crash in the everyday traffic of life. It’s basic economic sense, but Americans still don’t seem to get it sometimes: You need to keep a certain amount of money on hand for emergencies. You need to make sure you have insurance to cover what you wouldn’t be able to cover out-of-pocket. For most working people, this is not impossible — I make less than $20,000 a year (and again, I have a mortgage and other house-related bills, including property taxes), so I’m not coming at you with advice that’s only fit for the rich.

Respecting the cushion means that about 95% of the time, in matters of non-necessity, even if you want it, you do not pay full price for something. You consider your need for it. You consider the quality of it. You consider the alternatives. If you can’t afford it, you don’t buy it — for yourself or anyone else. This may sound strict or even callous, but I’ve relaxed my standards considerably since my undergrad days, when I lived on $125 per month for rent and $20 per month for food. Let’s just say that if my friends and I went out to eat, I would have ketchup. At home, I ate a lot of potatoes, some flavored with nothing more than pickle juice. You could get a 20-pound bag of potatoes for a few bucks then.

Clearly, this is not exactly a healthy lifestyle beyond the college years (even if it’s still more than what 50% of the world population lives on) and is in many ways socially unacceptable. Most of the time, you can be a cheapskate more gracefully than that.

If you don’t make a whole lot and are trying to correct years of bad spending habits or a grotesque school loan that didn’t pan out like you’d hoped, this is going to be tough. If you’re unemployed, clearly, it’s impossible. But I still think that if I can save money every year, it’s within reach for most working Americans. I know too many people, “fiscal conservatives” and otherwise, who spend their money before the month is out and then complain that it’s the fault of government handouts to lazy people — taxes need to be paid, and if you’re too shortsighted to budget according to your own reality, then consider yourself lazy as well, and part of the culture of debt.

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On Stuff

15 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by in American Christianity

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“Keep your life free from live of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, ‘I will never fail you nor forsake you.’ Hence we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?’ … for it is well that the heart be strengthened by grace, not by foods… do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” — Hebrews 13: 4-16.

Christians, and Americans by and large claim that faith, are supposed to adhere to the above passage. As many have noticed, Americans by and large are also materialists, capitalists, gunslingers devoted to their individual freedom, and/or envious of everyone more wealthy and successful than they are. The typical American’s knee-jerk reaction to this passage might be the question: “But this doesn’t mean we have to be poor because we’re Christians and share with, you know, the people who won’t use our stuff wisely, right?”

And the most honest answer would be, as Jim Wilson might say, well, because you asked, maybe it does. You should keep in mind that the founder of Christianity was a penniless, homeless Jewish man, who seemed to think being poor wasn’t such a bad estate and being rich just might be. His immediate reaction to financial oppression was in accordance with the Jewish law of giving four times as much as you originally took.

In this country at least, our errors tend to be of the selfish kind; rarely do we err on the side of being too generous. Rather, we keep boxes and boxes of stuff we don’t use on the off chance that it might come in handy someday. Rather, we buy the iPod, the more expensive appliance, the half-price Armani jacket, the book we’ll never read, the movie we may or may not even like, the knick-knack for the already-crowded shelf, because we suddenly, urgently need it. We may be defrauding another by doing this, particularly if, when we return home and place it on the shelf, it gets knocked over and broken, and its shards eat away our hearts. How dare this person be so stupid, so clumsy, so unconscious as to knock over something that didn’t belong to them? We will strike them from our will! They have obviously had too much leisure and too much luxury to understand the importance of possession, so they should be granted none. That’ll teach ‘em.

And we, being satiated with the importance of possession, nod knowingly, because we recognize the true value of Stuff.

The other day I was chatting about this concept with a co-worker, and mentioned that when I was a kid, my sister and I were fighting over a balloon. A common, cheap little balloon one of us had filled with air. My dad came over, took the balloon away, and popped it. He said: You must never let a thing become more important than your sister. At the time, I thought this barbaric (it was our balloon! He didn’t understand!) but looking back, it was a good lesson. My co-worker said: “That’s hella cool,” and proceeded to go home and clean out her house. She came in today with a sweater she thought would fit me and said as she was cleaning out all that stuff that no longer fit and were just taking up space, she repeated to herself: “it’s just a balloon. It’s just a balloon.”

By and large, it’s just a balloon, folks. I really like those shoes my grandmother gave me from the 1940s and I really liked my antique wedding ring (before it disappeared) and I really like my old journals and the photos I’ve taken and books I’ve collected and sand from different parts of the globe; my sweet French road bike and my more expensive but less sweet mountain bike; the clunky car my parents gave me for graduation—except it got dented from a deer and the door doesn’t open very well—the Hermes perfume I’ve only been able to find in Europe—and all that. But if I die, it’s just going to sit there. Or be used by somebody else. So why wouldn’t I share that stuff now, when it can actually do me some good to share it?